Comfort Inn and Suites – Conway, Arkansas

I generally try to keep this site pretty positive. I’m not out to do hit pieces on places, and if something isn’t that great I usually just don’t write about it, but holy crap, this was egregious.

On the way to Albuquerque, NM, we stopped in Conway Arkansas. We weren’t planning on leaving for ABQ until Sunday, but I left work early on Saturday and we all decide that it would make things easier if we went ahead and left a day early and put in a few hours of driving time to make the next day’s drive shorter. When we stopped at a gas station for a bathroom break, I pulled up PlugShare to find a little roadside hotel off of I40 with electric car chargers. The easiest one looked to the the Comfort Inn and Suites in Conway, Arkansas. It’s a pretty standard roadside hotel from a chain. It’s located like right next door to a Walmart (Which was nice because I forgot to pack a hoodie or any kind of jacket for a road trip in November). As PlugShare indicated, they do indeed have electric car chargers (two plugs for J1772 and four for Tesla).

And the hotel in general is pretty much exactly as you expect. The lobby looks like a highway hotel.

The room is bog-standard hotel too. A couple of beds, a little couch, TV, fridge, and microwave. It was clean enough, everything was basically fine with the room.

So, you may ask, what am I bitching about? The curtains. Of the lack of them. The window had the translucent curtains closer to the window, and then the thicker blackout style curtains pulled open to the sides. At least that’s what you think. When you turn the lights off, you realize that those thicker curtains over to the side are actually just decoration. You can’t close them. They’re only about a foot long on each side of the window. The tracks even stop about a foot from the side of the window. You can’t close the curtains at all. You just get a thin, translucent layer of curtains while you sleep.

Okay, so what’s the big deal about that? Well, the hotel right next door has a massive, brightly lit sign that sits right outside the window of the a whole-ass side of the hotel. So while you attempt to sleep, this is the light situation with every single light turned off in the room.

It basically looks like daytime while you attempt to sleep. And odds are, you aren’t going to notice this until you have unpacked all of your things and changed into pajamas and turned off the lights, in other words, way too late to go ask for your money back and move somewhere else. No one is gonna want to change hotels when they finally get settled in for the night. You’ll probably just do what I did and deal with crappy sleep for a night and then bitch about it on the internet later, but I now I have a new thing to check as soon as I walk into a hotel room: the curtains. If they don’t close all the way, especially in a pretty populated area with lots of outdoor lighting, I’m checking out.

Oh, also just never stay in Conway, Arkansas anyway, it’s a dry county, which is just bizarre at this point. Just stay in Little Rock and find a place with curtains.